- Variety of different styles of portrait
- Not just portrait format
- Portrait/Landscape/Square
- Depth is more important than breadth - Essay
Introduction to Photographic Studies
Colour Management
- everybody sees differently
- colour is subjective
- adobe RGB (or sRGB for web), Red, Green, Blue
- CMYK, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key Colour (Black)
- Possessions assignment to be both prints and on disk
- Printers in Uni not at acceptable standard as yet
- Quiz 45/50
Visual Research
- What is a 'found image'? - Photo of a photo, photo of road sign, photo of a tyre track
- Complex issue
- Influences - has everything been done already?
- Appropriate the change - image becomes something else
- Andy Warhol - Coca Cola - What did I see in this image?
- Mass-produced, uniformity, everywhere, shelving
- Common answers but in the Coca Cola image the bottles are different!
- Andy Warhol - Elvis - appropriate, Elvis has become a product
- Jeff Koons - Rabbit - pop life, reflections so that looking at art is part of artwork
- Also attitude and where the art is form part of the artwork
- Collage - Image A + Image B = Image C (not Image AB)
- Tom Wesselmann - Still Life No.30 (1963)
- A lot of art provokes issues without giving answers
Film: One Hour Photo (2002)
"truly, deeply scary"
I was thinking of having a large metal wall to display my photographs magnetically. Having seen this film, I am having second thoughts!
What I Liked about this film?
- Photos by kid with instant camera are intense and highly saturated images of toys, mainly close-up. They are superb!
- Great to see cutting of negatives and film process.
- Leica Digilux camera
Street Photography Tips
- Travel light, one or two lenses adequate
- Carry camera over shoulder, ready
- Use 1/250, f8
- Get close
- See a 'canvas' and wait for subject to walk into it
- Keep shooting even after you think you have the shot
- Keep the camera lower than subject's eye-level
- You have three seconds before you get noticed, when you do, stay part of the scene, smile and interact
Picturing Identity: Tanner, Bearden & Basquiat
- how to develop ideas
- what is the creative process
- relate to photography but aren't photography
- book: explore ideas, play with images, store-up ideas to be developed
Photography Within the Context of Other Arts
- Informed by and informing of other arts
- Interchange occurring between painting & photography
- Degas: After the Bath (1896) Photograph & painting
- Uncomfortable beginning
- 1837, mimicking of paintings what is already there, poses, ideas (specifity missing)
- Degas - part of methodology is a photo to help painting
- Early C19, painter did portraits
- After early C19, middle class could afford photographs
- Mimetic way, more lifelike
- Degas, impressionist and not middle of the road
- Too radical to be art. Codes and conventions
- Oil was mixed as needed and difficult to use out of studio
- Photography allowed capture of fleeting moment
- using a photo could help see unusual poses etc
- Preparation for painting
- Caillebotte: Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877)
- Aaron Siskind: Chicago (1948)
- Abstract expressionism, texture and form
- Jackson Pollock huge canvasses
- Gerhard Richter, paintings that look photographic
- Joel Peter Witkin: dead body
- Raft of the Medusa: metaphor for George W Bush
- Gregory Scott: paintings in his photos
- Michael Fajan: Zero Sum Game
- Environment that is predominently mixed-media
- Chance to experiment is now as an Undergraduate
Inspirational Quote
"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards." Soren Kierkegaard (Danish Philosopher 1813-1855)
Polaroid Workshop
- What's the big deal?
- Montage & Panoramic Image
- Image-making as opposed to image-taking
- We have taken the fastest process of image-taking and gone through really slow process
- Unique transformation of one image into another image
- Polaroid in a mixed media form - Stephanie Schneider
Assignment 2: Possessions
- Not cliched (out of the box)
- Use of Critical Journal
- Responding to Light
- Digital Capture
- Post Production
- Get in right in camera and don't rely on Photoshop
Photography & Ethics
- Self-reflective
- Own ethical code (which might change)
- Boris Mikhailov - Ukraine series (1998) Pays venerable people to pose in certain ways, decline of body and mind
- Germaine Greer quote on Diane Arbus
- Arnold Newman - Alfred Krupp (1963), subjective and how Newman wanted Krupp portrayed
- As a developing practitioner I need to decide what to do
- Is there a universal code or are they subjective
- Can i look in the mirror?
- What might the consequences be?
- No such thing as a simple checklist, honesty in gradation of photography
- Bert Stern - Marilyn Cross (1962), some images were crossed through with lipstick by Monroe but used after her death
- Paparazzi - hounding Ami Winehouse
- Mike Urban - Crowd Picture, handed to police
- Russell Sorgi - Buffalo suicide (1942)
- James Nachtwey - 9/11
- What you are prepared to photograph might be different from what you are prepared to print
Self & Identity
- developing ideas
- journey
- to help photography
- visual research book
- explore ideas for myself
- valuing process & research (what's in the sketchbook)
- have your own ideas generator, edgier stuff, not portfolio, not critical journal
- look at other artists work
- rather than portrait of self; what's there, how about what isn't there?
- other ways to remove objects
Photography & Conflict
- Conflict is a broader term than war (Berger - agony)
- Handout - John Berger
- Image by Don McCullin - Black & White - Black Blood
- Not truthful because its B&W
- "I only use the camera like I use a toothbrush, it does the job" (Cited in Wells L, 2003:289)
- When was technology available to record agony?
- Susan Sontag - Regarding the pain of others
- Photography shows what war does - mutilation and ruin
- American/Mexican War, newspapers - "show me don't tell me"
- Early conflict photography was "staged" because camera speed too slow
- Daguerreotype - "General Wool & Staff" was long exposure
- We don't see active warfare, we see staging or we see the aftermath
- Roger Fenton: "The Valley of the Shadow of Death" (1855)
- Photographers often have famous artists in their heads when they stage images
- Fenton's work reported back an oppositional image (imotive) and not the "official" image
- Canonball offers a terrible suggestion but does not show the war itself
- James Robertson was far more explicit (1856)
- Alexander Gardner, strewn dead bodies (1863) - horror and reality, political point, making a point that previous photography was putting a veil over the truth
- William Rider: Passchendaele (1917) first major conflict where newspapers could reproduce images easily at relatively good quality.
- No longer Kings Shilling, no longer elitist
- Images start to be censored by government
- Press works with government (self-censorship)
- Press do not want censorship so they show what they can
- Could not show dead soldiers in Britain
- Public didn't really see the soldiers experience of war
- Technology still not great
- Battles were in trenches so photography very difficult
- Night photography almost impossible
- Ernst Friedrich "War Against War" (1928) Compilation of images by other photographers
- Sontag - shock therapy, drawn from German archives
- The face of war, facial injuries. Book banned ten years later
- "The Fallen" by unknown photographer/soldier
- We start to see that those taking part in the war are taking the photographs
- Robert Capa: D-Day Landing (1944) Taking images of the battle itself
- Henri Cartier-Bresson - POW - Leica
- Eugene Smith - WWII
- Lee Miller: Buchenwald (1945) Conflict shown through subtle images and not metaphor
- Lee Miller gives official version
- Sontag - non polished images are welcomed - "I've got to show them"
- Larry Burrows: Vietnam (1966) No heroes, complex and contradictory
- Burrows lost Capa's photos in lab
- Images are now placed on the internet, leaked images, we all feel complicit
- Don McCullin now takes landscapes - Antithesis
- Inherrent contradiction
- What is the photographers aim? Strike concern in the viewer
- Aim was to politicise us into action
- Berger - photography of war doesn't affect human behavoir
- Tyler Hicks - triptych made front page of New York Times
- Sontag - What are we not seeing if we are seeing this?
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